If our priests and bishops would leave it at that, I think we would be a lot better off. Instead, around election time I hear sermons that tend to leave that part out and make other “social issues” seem of vital importance. It’s easy to see how pro-choice liberals get elected by Catholics.

mamajen: Sad but true. Social justice is the catch-all code word for pay-no-attention-to-his-faults, vote for him even though he supports abortion, because he wants to take more tax money to distribute as welfare.

It seems that many hierarchs don’t understand the nature of political discourse. We have a polarized situation in which it is expected for democrats to be pro-choice and republicans to be anti-choice. The fact is the president has little control over the constitution – it is what it is. On the other hand the principal driver for abortion is poverty, and little is said from either party regarding that crucial issue. It seems that the most conscientious vote would be for the candidate least likely to accelerate the explosion of poverty in our land thus further reducing the rate of abortion.

In the first place, it is constitutionally given to the president to nominate and appoint justices to the Supreme Court, the institution which we may thank for legalized abortion in the United States, (not the Constitution).

Secondly, I’m dismayed that a priest would use the term “anti-choice” is af it could possibly make him seem more sophisticated in anyway. I would think that the very least thing that a priest should be pro…is life.

Finally, is poverty really the principal driver for abortion as opposed to a culture wherein sex has become a pastime and women are regarded as mere playthings by (some) men (more than others), to be taken advantage of by them at will and cast aside just as quickly? Has it nothing to do with a culture that regards children as an inconvenience rather than a blessing amongst affluent men and women alike, who live for pleasure, success, and independence rather than home and hearth?

It seems to me that the most conscientious vote would be for the candidate least likely to appoint leftist justices to the Supreme Court and most likely to address fundamental values that we, as a people, have lost sight of.

The only quibble there is for one to have with Bishop Vasa’s quote is the fact that it is gramatically incorrect. He ought to have said, “particularly one who claims to be Christian”. Apart from that, however, he’s got it quite right, hasn’t he?

I have seen a lot of conjecture on this blog about President Obama being pro-abortion but haven’t seen any facts to back it up. Could someone provide proof or point me to a site that supports this line of thinking? I’m having a hard time believing this viewpoint.

What state follows permissive? Guessing that a society of me’s has gone so far beyond being permissive, that without the Guide of the Ten Commandments (the Sixth bringing on the Fifth) in public, the word should be changed to philistine-istic. Maybe they’ve been staging a return?

My parents were terribly poor when they got married. Their first bedroom set was a mattress on top of milk crates. My mom was pregnant with her first child in 1958. She recalled, during that time, going to a party with my dad when a very well-dressed woman began screaming at her husband to look at how poor my parents were, yet they got to have a baby while she had to have an abortion. Perhaps taking the life of their child meant they got to dress nicer and have nicer things. Of all the struggles of poverty that my parents had to deal with early in life, they never had to deal with the poverty of killing their child in order to struggle less or to have more. We ate a lot of red noodles – macaroni with tomato sauce – but I never thought my family was poor. As for me, I’d rather live in a very poor country where taking the life of one’s own child was considered an unthinkable crime, than to live in a rich country that thought the fear of poverty, or any other fear was a reasonable excuse to tear a child from his/her mother’s womb.

There are many places you could find this information. Just Google “Mexico City Policy”; one of Obama’s first acts was to rescind that policy, so that federal funds could go to the funding of abortions overseas.

Bwahaha! You think getting rid of poverty will lower abortions? Even wealthy and well-off people will abort… after all that’s time and money they’d rather spend elsewhere on themselves rather than some unwanted inconvenient amount of children, thus making their lives a little more poorer… People will always find convenient excuses to abort, from lack of money, to being unwilling to put in the work to raise a child, to wanting more sex but no more ‘risks’ of children, to wanting to fit into that dress in time for some social event, to just plain old fashioned covering up of adultery and abuse.

Either way, murdering people is not a strategy to reduce poverty. In fact it is argued by the very people you’re pinning your hopes on to reduce poverty that eliminating a good amount of the global population will help save more resources for the rest of us. And the way to reduce that risk of poverty is directly attributed to promoting immoral sexual lifestyles and abortion for all. A wikileaks article exposed one of the U.S. reasons for pushing abortions overseas in the Philippines was so that the U.S. could have more access to the country’s natural resources rather than its own people. How shameful and utterly selfish!

Centristian and Fr_Sotelo, I can’t think of a more logically correct term that “anti-choice” because de facto those who oppose abortion do not want people to have the choice of elective abortion. Further, many of those who call themselves “pro-life” are very soft on many life issues other than abortion. For example I have heard self proclaimed “pro-lifers” advocate for capital punishment, etc. “Pro-life” would imply that one has a consistent ethic of life in all respects, and not merely in the single issue of abortion.

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“The legalization of the termination of pregnancy is none other than the authorization given to an adult, with the approval of an established law, to take the lives of children yet unborn and thus incapable of defending themselves. It is difficult to imagine a more unjust situation, and it is very difficult to speak of obsession in a matter such as this, where we are dealing with a fundamental imperative of every good conscience — the defense of the right to life of an innocent and defenseless human being.”

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“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

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“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. . . . Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

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